[-empyre-] Aesthetics of Queer Relationality

[virginia solomon]

we all gotta figure for every 5 people you ask you'll get 10 definitions of
terms!!



On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Christiane Robbins <cpr at mindspring.com>wrote:

> Virginia - Hi -
> Many thanks for proferring your definitions below as the basis for
> elaborating further upon our "dinner conversation"  and as a means of
> departure ...
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 7, 2009, at 8:20 AM, virginia solomon wrote:
>
> Hi Everyone
>
> Like everyone else, I'd like to thank Christina for inviting me to be
> involved in what is turning into quite the rich conversation, and also to my
> co-conversants for engagement!
>
> I have SO much to say about what everyone else has posted, but I'll start
> here with just saying a bit about my connection to this topic, which will
> pick up a bit on what Robert alluded to in his last parasite post.
>
> First to loosely define a few terms, as I understand them.
>
> Aesthetics - this term has come up already on this post, and I share Marc's
> distrust of how the word and the concept have circulated in philosophical
> and modernist discourse, but I use it a bit differently here.  Rather than a
> set style, I think of aesthetics as an operation, as a mode of engagement
> that takes up a different kind of logic, a different kind of sense-making,
> than language per se, in terms of presenting theory and offering ways of
> imagining alternative modes of being and producing knowledge.  Clearly this
> is neither a Kantian nor a Hegelian aesthetic, but I think that the
> practices that interest me still fit within the allusive capabilities of the
> term precisely because of their explorations of alterative, less oppressive
> forms of communicability.  This is what aesthetics can offer, I think, in
> relation to queerness.
>
> Queer - Queer, to me, is not an identity.  This is really important.  It is
> not a noun.  It is a verb, it is a performative as Bulter describes it as an
> enactment that brings something into being but is precisely that enactment
> that demonstrates the unnatrualness of the norm.  The queer is that which,
> ontologically, and this is its only ontology, undermines dominant structures
> of meaning making, which then dictate how we understand knowledge of and
> being in the world.  There is some danger of idealizing the queer, of seeing
> it as some utopian space of absolute radicality and opposition.  But this is
> to misunderstand queerness.  It isn't a space that one can occupy.  And the
> idea of absolute radicality is anatametic to queerness, because absolutes
> are precisely a part of the system of meaning making that the queer, AS AN
> OPERATION, seeks to interrogate.
>
> Relationality - To recite a story with which I'm sure many of us are
> familiar, the bourgeois subject is defined precisely by 'his' autonomy,
> 'his' fixity as a self and 'his' absolute ability for self-determination.
> That is the dominant narrative of being that we inherit from the
> Enlightenment, from Modernism, etc.  This is one of the primary sites in
> which I see the queer operation, queerness as an embodied and lived
> interrogation, operating.  Queerness, since Sedgwick and Butler, has
> insisted on the way in which 'we' form the 'I.'  By relationality I mean
> both the way in which how we understand our very bodies is a relational
> process, but I also mean the ways we relate to each other in the world, as
> simple and as complicated as sociability, social life, socializing.
>
> Thus for me the aesthetics of queer relationality circulate throughout all
> spheres of social production, and I am interested in art practices that draw
> upon this, that enact this operation, as part of a world-making, or rather a
> space-for-imagination-opening, project.
>
> This has gotten long so maybe I'll talk about more stuff under another
> post?  As an art historian, I sort of see my position here as talking about
> stuff, and the theory that comes from stuff rather than theory that comes
> from theory (impossible to distinguish as that is).
>
> --
> Virginia Solomon
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
>
> *
> C h r i s t i a n e   R o b b i n s*
> **
>
> * - JETZTZEIT** -*
> ... the space between zero and one  ...
> *Walter Benjamin*
> **
>
> LOS ANGELES    I    SAN FRANCISCO
>
>
> The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the
> original, fancy to reality,
> the appearance to the essence
> for in these days
>  illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
> *
> *
> *Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872,** *
> *
> *
>
> http://www.jetztzeit.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Virginia Solomon
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